Now it’s amazing how complicated people are. You think you know them and suddenly you realize that there is a whole other side to them that you never even realized existed. Here I am looking at a website that I wasn’t expecting. Let me read you what it says:

Britney’s Guide to Semiconductor Physics: It is a little known fact, that Britney Spears is an expert in semiconductor physics. Not content with just singing and acting, in the following pages, she will guide you in the fundamentals of the vital laser components that have made it possible to hear her super music in a digital format.

Who’d a thunk it? I’ll include a link to that site on the podictionary blog.

Now you may think I’m going off on a tangent here and that Britney Spears has very little to do with etymology. And of course you are right, but I’m doing it for a reason. When someone goes off on a tangent—and I do it all the time—they are invoking a word that comes from math.

You know of course what a tangent is in math. Actually it’s a couple of things.

In geometry a tangent is a straight line that touches another line, often a circle, in just one place. The reason this is called a tangent is that in Latin the word tangere meant “to touch” and that’s what the line does, it just touches the circle.

In trigonometry there’s also a tangent. While this kind of tangent seems more complicated it really isn’t. The word trigonometry also comes from Latin of course and it literally means “triangle measurement”, so once you know that, trigonometric tangents can be a snap. Think of that geometric tangent touching the circle (A). If you draw a line from the place it touches the circle, to the middle of the circle (A, O), then you’ll have two lines that are at 90 degrees to one another. To make a triangle you just need one more line slapped in there somewhere. If you start that third line at the middle of the circle (O) and draw it out to cross the tangent line at some random place (Q), it becomes pretty clear that the place it crosses the tangent line will be farther away when the angle (X) is bigger between this third line and that other line to the middle of the circle. The relationship between the angle and the distance out the touching line is called the tangent function.

But enough of that. I’ve put a simple diagram on the blog too if you can’t follow my logic.

The point is that a tangent touches once and then goes away and that’s why, when I’m telling stories that seem to have nothing to do with etymology, I’m off on a tangent.

The first guy to use this mathematical word with a rhetorical meaning was that famous Scottish poet Robbie Burns. The mathematical meaning appeared first in 1583 in Latin and before the century was out was popping up as if the word was English, which of course is what makes a word English. About 200 years later Robbie Burns used the now English word—not in one of his poems that are written with such a heavy Scottish brogue that they’re sometimes hard to read—but instead in a letter to a friend which is written in refreshingly understandable English.

That’s what I was getting at when I brought up Britney Spears and how people have more sides to them than we often realize. I was happy to see that Burns didn’t always write in such an impenetrable way. Maybe he was a closet math geek if he was the first one to use tangent with a non-mathematical meaning.

But imagine my shock and horror when I learned that one of his favourite things to write in letters to his friends was dirty poetry. I guess like Britney Spears there are some sides of some people that I’d just rather not know.

When a meteor bashes into the ground, or a bomb goes off and leaves a big hole we commonly call the result a crater. The first time anyone did this in English was in 1613 and the guy who did it was named Samuel Purchas. He wasn’t talking about a meteor or explosion crater though, he was talking about the crater in the top of a volcano. He took this meaning from Latin where as well as the mouth of a volcano, the word crater had meant a bowl or basin.

It took more than 100 years before another meaning for the word crater made it into English, but even though it arrived later, its meaning was more faithful to the original. That latecomer was crater meaning a large bowl for mixing water and wine together.

These days we like our wine as it comes from the bottle, which is usually pretty nearly as it came from the grape, without any water added. But the ancient Greeks would have looked down their noses at such barbarous ways because they felt the correct way to enjoy wine was to pour it into water—never the other way around—in a large mixing bowl. Actually in Greek krater means “mixer” and that’s what they called these vessels. They used to throw drinking parties that lasted all night and some of the mixing bowls they used were simply enormous. In the 1950s near Paris archeologists dug up one of these things that’s now known as the Krater of Vix. It stands more than five feet tall and holds about 250 gallons.

That guy I mentioned who first wrote about volcanic craters Samuel Purchas, he wrote it in one of a series of travel books he authored back there in Shakespeare’s day. The party theme continued when it was over that very book that Samuel Taylor Coleridge fell asleep one night and aided by opium instead of wine dreamed up his famous poem:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree…

The American Heritage Dictionary defines a metaphor as:

“A figure of speech in which a word or phrase that ordinarily designates one thing is used to designate another, thus making an implicit comparison”

They give as an example Shakespeare’s “all the world’s a stage.” Clearly all the world is not a stage but Shakespeare had the line delivered from a stage and compared the people of the world to actors playing their parts.

It was more than a century before Shakespeare that the word metaphor came into English and it did so in a most appropriate document. The year was 1477 and the document something called The Ordinall of Alchimy by one Thomas Norton. This is actually a kind of poem about the secrets of alchemy and the reason that the subject of alchemy is so appropriate for the word metaphor is that writings on alchemy written by alchemists had always been as obscure as possible and used piles of metaphor in favour of straightforward explanations on how to turn lead into gold. The author himself tells us that it is traditional for alchemists to not explain themselves except to one deserving pupil who they train up. That, in fact, it was forbidden among the secret sect of alchemy to write down the formulas and spells required for their art. To this end all descriptions are made by actually describing something else, or describing the opposite and then contradicting oneself. The point being to be as confusing as possible to those who don’t understand alchemy, while leaving sufficient clues for those who do.

Sounds something like a tax form to me.

In any case, the etymology if metaphor is a great one. It comes to English from the French of the Norman Conquest and of course from Latin before that. But originally the word came from ancient Greek where it literally meant “between bear” or less strictly “carry across.” So it is the idea that an analogy can carry a concept across from one scenario to another. But the best part is that in Greek it still means “carry across” or “transfer” and Greek moving vans are labelled metaphor.

Link to Amazon for Charles Hodgson’s book

Although one contributor to Urbandictionary attempts to tie the word scuttlebutt to the butt that is short for buttocks, the truth is that the butt in scuttlebutt was once a barrel.

These days scuttlebutt means “gossip” or “rumor” to most people. That meaning is first cited in the Oxford English Dictionary only just over 100 years ago from a navy magazine called the Smoking Lamp. The reason scuttlebutt means what it means to us today, is that before that it meant a place where people gathered for a drink. When people drink they will talk, but in this case the beverage on offer was just water. Here’s the story.

About 500 years ago the English navy began to call the hatches in the decks of its ships scuttles. Exactly why this was so is unclear. It might have come from French, similar words seem also to have been in use in Spanish and Portuguese as well. There is some sketchy evidence also that this word scuttle actually had earlier applied to the hatch cover, not the hatch itself, and as such could possibly be related to our word shut. But the point is that a scuttle was a square hole in the deck of a ship.

For reasons that I can’t imagine ship owners and captains through history have sometimes found it justifiable to sink their own ships on purpose. You may recognize the word scuttle as also applying to this action. It’s easy to figure out that if you cut holes in the hull of a ship it will sink, hence, the transference of the word from a hole on the top side of the ship, to the result of a similar hole on the bottom side of a ship. So much for scuttle.

The word butt, as I’ve said, was once a barrel. Sailors need to drink water like everyone else and so a barrel of water was usually kept up on deck for them to come by and dip their cups into. A sealed barrel didn’t help much so two cuts were made into a barrel lying on its side. The cut barrel staves would then be removed leaving a nice square opening that looked a lot like a hatch. So the water barrel gained the name of scuttlebutt.

Just like people sometimes refer to rumor that they heard at the water cooler, sailors gained their gossip at the scuttlebutt and so the word scuttlebutt began to be applied to the gossip and rumor.

I said that the first citation we have for this was from a naval magazine called the Smoking Lamp. It turns out that smoking lamp was chosen as the title of the magazine for similar reasons that scuttlebutt came to mean rumor. Although it never caught on as a phrase meaning news, smoking lamp referred to a lamp that used to be carried aboard ships for two purposes. The main purpose was to keep sailors from smoking near explosive cargo. To achieve this the lamp, which was the old kind of lamp that actually had a flame, was lit or put out according to when it was approved time for sailors to be smoking. But the smoking lamp was more than that. Like the scuttlebutt it was a place to gather and exchange news and gossip, because it represented a light from which they could light their pipes and cigarettes.

This is one of those chicken and egg words that seem a bit strange in terms of which came first. It seems strange to me anyway that this name we give a color never existed in English before it appeared as the name of a fruit. The first citation we have for orange is from 1400 and it is in what might be called an early Latin English dictionary that translates the Latin words for “citrus apple” into the English orange. It was another 150 years before anyone wrote down that orange was a color.

English speakers must have seen things that were this color before 1557, but what did they call it? The only candidate I can come up with that seems to predate orange is saffron.

Oranges themselves were first eaten in China and then over the millennia became items of trade that made their way west to India and the Middle East before Europeans had ever heard of them. It was in India that the parent word of orange seems to first have attached itself to the fruit before being carried through Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic into Spain and the rest of continental Europe. Just as Spanish at the time was somewhere between being Latin and Spanish, Italian was between being Latin and Italian. Old French took the word for the fruit from the Italians before handing it over to the English.

These days oranges are common enough, but even I’m old enough to remember tales from my parents, or was it grandparents, of an orange being a thrilling gift to find in your Christmas stocking. Better than a lump of coal I guess. Anyway to an Englishman 600 years ago they must have seemed pretty exotic and so it’s fitting that the first citation I mentioned is by a guy who likely was using oranges for medicinal purposes. John Mirfield was the author and he was a priest-physician in St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London those 600 years ago. Aside from his medical Latin English dictionary John Mirfield wrote a couple of encyclopedias. These were in Latin, but one was on religious matters, the other on medical matters. His aim was to help other professionals like himself kill fewer patients. He has some good advice in there, like boil your water if you don’t want it to make you sick. He even discusses the implications of administering more than one drug at a time.

But he has little time or sympathy for non-professionals which in his mind include the illiterate—a group that in his day constituted the vast majority of the population—and especially women who he felt had a natural inability as medical professionals. I guess he’d disapprove of the fact that almost a third of practicing physicians in North America today are women, about 40% of graduating physicians are women and that about half of medical school applications are from women.

Orange you glad he was mistaken about that?

Just to wrap this up, Orangemen, the Orange Lodge and William of Orange are all just accidentally related to orange the fruit and the color. All of those oranges take their name from a town in France that evidently was founded by the Romans and had nothing to do with the fruit or color except a similarity in sound.

Link to Charles’s book on the words we use for our bodies.

I was being interviewed recently and talking about a certain eponym that had morphed after it was first coined. You of course know that an eponym is a word that started out as someone’s name. Anyway, the interviewer wondered about how the name later changed in the hurly-burly of English use and he said:

“Well, we still have the word hooker. I mean we don’t go ‘Ah what was his name again, General Prostitute?’ “

Ha ha ha I laughted, but in fact I didn’t actually know what he was talking about.

It turns out that there is a folk etymology floating around out there that there was this guy, General Joseph Hooker was the origin for the word hooker that we now give to prostitutes. How this association could come about is explained, by those who tell the tale, as being because Joe Hooker was not a very strict military leader and allowed his troops to spend plenty of time in the company of paid ladies of the night. This story is persistent enough that not only did my interviewer seem to know it, and believe it, but the American Heritage Dictionary and Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable both feel compelled to say that it isn’t true.

The word hooker certainly predates old Joe Hooker. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first citation in the year when William Shakespeare was three years old, that’s 1567. This first citation didn’t mean a “prostitute” though, it was a thief who used a hook to snag his loot. The first citation for hooker as a prostitute came quite a bit later in 1845.

The OED certainly doesn’t associate the man with the ill-reputed women either, so the cumulative evidence presented by the authoritative sources makes me think General Joe Hooker wasn’t the source.

The argument is that the chronology is wrong, so let’s examine that. In 1845 Joe Hooker was 31 years old and had been serving in the army for 11 years. That’s old enough to fraternize with prostitutes and long enough to build a bad reputation isn’t it? But from what I can tell his womanizing days didn’t get into gear until the US war with Mexico and that only got into gear the year after the first citation. Furthermore his role at the outset of that conflict was as a military staff member and he didn’t raise to the rank of General until much later, in the Civil war. So the etymology of hooker the prostitute rests on the criminality of prostitution, not on the bad reputation of Joe Hooker.

But there’s no question that Joe had a bad reputation. By all accounts he was a tall and handsome guy with no shortage of bravado. He proved himself to be a good military organizer but Ulysses Grant thought he was a dangerous leader because he was such a lone wolf and was willing to sacrifice his troops for greater personal glory.

Although the etymology of hooker as prostitute isn’t based on Joe Hooker, it’s pretty likely that the reason hooker is such a widely recognized synonym is because so many people believed the General Hooker connection

In 1686 a prayer book was published that left out one critical word so that it read:

Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these, adultery, fornication, uncleanness, idolatry… they who do such things shall inherit the kingdom of God.

Oops! I guess it was supposed to say “they shall not inherit the kingdom of God.” As a result of this printing error the publication became known as the wicked prayer book.

Of course something that is wicked is bad, unless it’s good. The Harry Potter series of books was protested as being bad, although most people (if their buying patterns are to be believed) think it’s good. There is a connection because Harry Potter is a wizard, and it was a protest against all that black magic stuff that some religious groups were raising a fuss about. And according to the Oxford English Dictionary wizards are at the root of the word wicked as well.

Something that is wicked has the attributes of a wick. Back in Old English a wicca was a wizard and this that’s also the source of our word witch. The American Heritage Dictionary takes the root back to an Indo-European source weg which meant “to be strong.” It’s those black magic powers.

I mentioned that although to be wicked was to be bad, it can also be good. I see from Urbandictionary that people especially associate something being wicked good with New England and Boston in particular. But the wicked good meaning has been around since 1920 with a first citation from F. Scott Fitzgerald.

F. Scott Fitzgerald perhaps had more wicked character traits than Harry Potter—wicked bad I mean. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote some pretty enduring books like The Great Gatsby but the guy was a real party animal and wild man. He and his wife Zelda would volunteer to act as chaperones at Princeton parties and later claimed not to have drawn a sober breath for the sometimes three days the parties went on. Another time they arrived late to a dinner party. Everyone else had already eaten but they were served their dinner anyway. As the opening soup dish arrived they both fell asleep sitting at the table because they’d been out partying so hard for so long. After an hour or so Fitzgerald raises his head, goes to the phone and orders two cases of champaign to be delivered.

In more sober moments they found it necessary to post party rules for their house including:

• Visitors are requested not to break down doors in search of liquor, even when authorized to do so by the host or hostess.
• Weekend guests are respectfully notified that invitations to stay over Monday, issued by the host and hostess during the small hours of Sunday morning, are not to be taken seriously.

Before the age of jet-setters the Fitzgeralds brought their party habits to Europe. Scott sat with a bunch of friends being shuttled by cab and calmly ate 100 franc notes, chewed them up and spat them out the window. This is like $20 a spit when $20 was worth more than $200 is now. For some reason this drove the cab driver bonkers and he was unwise enough to stop the cab and go back to grab one of the chewed up bills. With the driver’s seat empty, guess who grabbed the wheel? Not entertaining enough? Okay, Scott thinks, how about I drive right into the Seine River? This was too much for the other passengers who wrenched control from him as he headed for a boat ramp.

I guess he was a wizard with his typewriter though

As long as it has been in English the word collar has meant something that went around people’s necks, usually as part of their clothing. That was about 600 years ago. We got it from French and the French in turn got it from Latin; the usual old story. But the Romans built the word collar from something else, even though they usually wore togas which didn’t have collars. The reason Romans chose this word for something that went around the neck was was because their word for “neck” was collum.

Now it may seem that a person’s neck holds up their head just as a column does the roof of an old Roman building, but the two words are different and come from different roots.

The collum that gave us collar came from roots in Indo-European that meant to “turn around.” So it’s because we can turn our heads on our necks that the neck got called the collum. This idea that the neck might be named because of its ability to turn isn’t unique to Latin. In Old English one of the words for “neck” was hales. That word also derives from the same Indo-European root related “to turn” and in fact is also related to the word wheel.

The word neck did exist in Old English as hnecca but it really referred to the back of the neck, just as the throat might be thought of as referring to the front of the neck today.

The all time champion at turning heads—its own head anyway—is the owl. An owl seems able to turn its head almost like a Barbie doll. Our vertebra have a bunch of little pokey parts sticking out that interlock with the bones above and below in the spinal column to prevent us turning our heads too much and damaging the nerves inside. But an owl needs to be able to turn its head more than we do because it can’t actually turn its eyes in its sockets. An owl’s eyes aren’t round. So an owl has twice as many vertebra in its neck to give it that extra twisting action.

Now an owl doesn’t wear a collar, but dogs do. A quote by that Scottish poet Robbie Burns relates. He wrote:

His locked, letter’d, braw brass collar
Shew’d him the gentleman and scholar.

The “gentleman and scholar” Burns is talking about is a dog and dog collars have been called collars in English just about as long as people’s collars. The first citation though wasn’t for a dog, but for a cat. This was in the 1300s and the cat’s collar was to have a bell. But these were not to be placed on the cat’s neck, but instead on his hals. There’s that Old English “neck” word again and it shows that even well after William the Conqueror’s invasion of 1066, Old English persisted. In fact the cat-collar citation is in a sentence that’s full of Old English alphabetical characters that we don’t recognize anymore; characters not as recognizable as A and B but instead called thorn and yogh.

Trying to read it kind of makes your head spin

In a waiting room I saw one of those magazines with lots of pictures of country houses that must cost a million bucks. The cover had teasers on it about what was inside. One of these was how to combine the modern into one of these houses and still keep a rustic look.

I took a look for rustic in the dictionaries and confirmed my understanding of the word. Something rustic is something that belongs in the country. It seems that once in a while people are called rustic if they are country bumpkins but I guess there are less and less of those people around anymore and so almost all the citations for rustic that I saw in recent newspapers and magazines were talking about architecture.

The roots of the word rustic go back to Latin where rusticus grew out of rus meaning “country. ” I guess the Romans lived in a city, Rome, and they were maybe more conscious than we are about the open land surrounding them. For one thing they were more intimately connected to their food supplies than we are shopping at our grocery stores. For another they seemed very keen on getting out of town and taking over huge swaths of territory to build their empire.

In any case the American Heritage Dictionary traces the Latin root of rustic back to Indo-European and a word reu that had a meaning of “open space.” This gives me a mental image of Rome with its walls and pillars contrasting with open farmer’s fields. A rural scene. And guess what, the word rural grew out of the same Latin root.

Both rustic and rural came into English around the same time, in the early 1400s. The Oxford English Dictionary says that rustic came from Latin and rural came from French. But although rustic may have come straight from Latin, the OED does point out that there was a French word rustique around the same time. And though rural might have come from French, of course the French word would have been Latin before that.

The OED says that at first the meanings of rustic and rural in English were pretty well identical but that with time the word rural tended to be associated with location while rustic was associated with something primitive.

The first citation for rustic that we have is in an English translation of a document called Palladius on Husbondrie and appears to be from a passage describing delicious herbs that you can grow and add to your food. Palladius himself would have been writing in Latin so that explains why the OED says the word rustic comes from Latin. But if this was a translation and the translator felt comfortable leaving the Latin word in as an English word, then probably the word was in circulation among English speakers already, and likely it would have gotten there because it came from the French of the Norman Conquest a few centuries earlier.

That other word rural is first cited in the writings of a guy named John Lydgate and he was one generation after Geoffrey Chaucer. In fact he knew Chaucer and was a friend of Geoffrey’s son, and Lydgate is said to have taken lots of his inspiration from Chaucer’s writings. For many centuries Lydgate was seen in almost as an important light as Chaucer. I bring this up because Chaucer’s writing is often pointed to as exemplary of Middle English and the biggest thing about Middle English is the influence French had on it.

But getting back to rustic; it turns out that the magazine on expensive country homes that I noticed also has an etymological connection to the word rustic. Since the Indo-European root means “space”, it also is the root of our word room, and what is a house but a collection of rooms?

This is the 600th episode of podictionary (for those who care). I’ve also surpassed three million downloads, so something must be working.

Since I write out a script for each episode of the podcast I guess write is an appropriate word for this momentous episode. But of course when I write what I am actually doing is typing, not scribbling with a pen or pencil on a piece of paper or parchment.

English is unique among European languages with a basis in Indo-European in not using some derivative of the Latin word for write, scribere. That’s of course where scribble comes from, but obviously not write. According to the Oxford English Dictionary English instead took its word for the setting down of thoughts into words on paper—or the computer screen—from a Germanic source writa or writan that meant “to score.” By score the OED means “scratch” as you would do if you were carving your name in a park bench or something.

I guess it’s no coincidence that the Latin scribere had also meant “scratch.” That’s how people wrote when they didn’t have keyboards. In fact scratch comes from that same Indo-European root that scribere does. The first citation for the Old English word writan is the year 831 which makes it one of the older words we have English records for.

One of the later citations that jumped out at me was from 1562 by a guy named Arthur Brooke. The reason it jumped out at me was because the name of the document from which this citation for write is plucked is Romeus and Juliet.

Now they say that Shakespeare could tell a great story, as long as he’d heard it before. And here is the evidence in the case of Romeo and Juliet. It’s not as if Arthur Brook was the original creator of the tale however; he was translating it in free verse from Italian. But there seems to be evidence that there was a play on stage even before Brooke turned his scratchy pen to it, and that Brooke’s poetic version was very very popular, so that Shakespeare may have not only been a genius in his re-crafting of the words into a play, but in picking it in the first place as a subject for his play, since it had proven market success.

He wasn’t writing from scratch.